Rhyme's Challenge

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

David Caplan

Makes a spirited argument for hip-hop as an important form of contemporary American poetry

Discusses hip-hop artists such as Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West alongside canonical poets like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Auden

Penned in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and students interested in hip hop and/or contemporary poetry

Offers an overview of three prominent rhymes favored by hip hop artists: doggerel, insult, and seduction

Rhyme's Challenge

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

David Caplan

Description

Rhyme's Challenge offers a concise, pithy primer to hip-hop poetics while presenting a spirited defense of rhyme in contemporary American poetry. David Caplan's stylish study examines hip-hop's central but supposedly outmoded verbal technique: rhyme. At a time when print-based poets generally dismiss formal rhyme as old-fashioned and bookish, hip-hop artists deftly deploy it as a way to capture the contemporary moment. Rhyme accommodates and colorfully chronicles the most conspicuous conditions and symbols of contemporary society: its products, technologies, and personalities. Ranging from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Eminem and Jay-Z, David Caplan's study demonstrates the continuing relevance of rhyme to poetry -- and everyday life.

Rhyme's Challenge

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

David Caplan

Author Information

David Caplan is Charles M. Weis Chair in English and Associate Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. His previous books include Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form and the poetry collection In the World He Created According to His Will.

Rhyme's Challenge

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

David Caplan

Reviews and Awards

"A refreshingly serious and stimulating consideration of the formal tendencies of hip hop, Caplan's study infuses previous readings of hip hop's social concerns and historical situations with an exacting look at the pleasures and ramifications of rhyme." --Yasmine Shamma, Poetry Magazine (Poetryfoundation.org)

"Ultimately, this is a hopeful book, one that sees flux as a positive and that sees analysis as an aid to enjoying art in all its facets and embodiments, from the commercial to the high brow...the increasing influence of hip hop will continue to challenge contemporary poets to see rhyme not as a stale technique but as an energizing one." --Charlotte Pense, The Rumpus

"In Rhyme's Challenge David Caplan makes the case that rhymes live all around us and express themselves most evocatively in hip hop. He draws rich connections across music, culture, law, politics, science, and beyond. This is a rare kind of book: rooted but daring, learned but hip. It bears out Chuck D's claim that 'what counts is that the rhyme's / Designed to fill your mind.' Caplan cares deeply about rhyme; after reading this book, so will you." --Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

"If you want to see the very traditional techniques of literary analysis prove their worth once more, if you want to see what those techniques can do for, with, and about Big Daddy Kane and Missy Elliot, Jay-Z and Lupe Fiasco, there's no substitute for the close reading and closer listening Caplan provides; and if you want to see what rap's techniques (not just its subjects; its techniques) contribute to present-day page-based poetry, from Major Jackson to D. A. Powell, Caplan's work is surely a, if not the, place to go. You might even go from it back to the rappers themselves." --Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense

"Intriguing...Makes a strong case that there is more to hip-hop in terms of artistry than is often granted." --The American Conservative

"David Caplan's Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture is a much needed book because it examines the significance of rhymes in American hip hop across races and cultures. After a brief analysis of the significance of rhymes in contemporary American culture generally, Caplan provides a thorough study of the importance of poetry in African-American hip hop. His book is groundbreaking." -- Popular Music and Society

"Organized through topics like insult and seduction, Rhyme's Challenge is mindful of subject matter but inclines toward an intensively close reading of other formal elements. [I]t is the precision and insight of Caplan's analyses that leave the strongest impression, along with his concluding argument that hip hop has already had an influence on a generation of print-based poets of various races, which is likely to persist as this century continues." --American Literary History

"Finely articulated, Rhyme's Challenge demonstrates Caplan's creativity, command of language, and rich and varied use of sources...Caplan presents a thoughtful, intricate, and persuasive text that will serve as a catalyst for scholars willing to accept his challenge." --The Bulletin of the Society for American Music

Rhyme's Challenge

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

David Caplan

From Our Blog

Hip hop has increasingly influenced a new generation of American poets. For instance, the current issue of Poetry excerpts poems and essays from the recently published anthology, The BreakBeat Poets, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall. In the anthology's introduction, Marshall asserts: "This is the story of how generations of young people reared on hip-hop culture and aesthetics took to the page and poem and microphone to create a movement in American letters in the tradition of the Black Arts, Nuyorican, and Beat generations and add to it and innovate on top."

By David Caplan Hip hop has influenced a generation of poets coming to prominence, poets I call 'The Inheritors of Hip Hop.' Signaling how the music serves as a shared experience and inspiration, they mention performers and songs as well as anecdotes from the genre's development and the artists' lives, while epigraphs and titles quote songs.